


sweetest kill

by ophelietta



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Other, QUEEN IN THE NORTH!, Revenge Fantasies, S6 plot bunnies, Sansa is a BAMF, Tattoo Kink, all the scars, porn with the barest bones of plot, sad bear Sandor, that awkward moment in the middle of fucking when you find yourself making love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-03-13
Updated: 2017-03-13
Packaged: 2018-10-03 23:43:50
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,450
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10261727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ophelietta/pseuds/ophelietta
Summary: Modern mob AU. The Wolf Bitch mates after she kills.Porn with the barest bones of plot!Or, in less crass terms: With Sandor at her side, Sansa teaches her enemies that the gentlest and prettiest in a family of wolves is still a wolf.





	

Rickon had his fists, bare knuckled and tattooed. Arya had her butterfly knives, the bright steel dancing like water. But Sansa prefers her Beretta, the dark grey gunmetal engraved with blossoms and a running wolf, a sweet sixteen present from her father.

As a teenager, she’d dragged her feet and whined when Dad brought all them to the range. She’d fretted over her calluses and whined about how they were so gross and un-lady-like. Mom’s mouth had thinned to a line, but Dad was Dad, through and through, and he had insisted. _Cool head, steady arm_ , he had said, a lifetime ago. _No daughter of mine is going into this world unarmed._

She wishes that she’d spent less time trading notes about boys with Jeyne, and more time putting bullets into paper silhouettes. She’s making up for lost time now, her arm rock steady as she aims her Beretta at Joffrey Baratheon’s chest.

Dad had also said, _If you would take a man’s life, you owe it to them to look into their eyes and hear their final words. And if you cannot bear to do that, then perhaps they do not deserve to die._

It’s for her father’s sake that she nods to Sandor, and says, “Un-gag him.”

As soon as the knotted terrycloth is out of his mouth, Joffrey is screaming. She can hear _whore_ and _slut_ and _traitor_ mixed into an ugly, meaningless din. She studies her watch - black face and black band, slim gold hands, a gift from Margaery - and waits until Joffrey is out of breath. His face is red and squinchy, and he thrashes so hard that she’s surprised he hasn’t tipped his chair over.

When he gets his breath back, he turns on Sandor. The din sharpens into words.

“You pathetic fucking _dog_ ,” Joff snarls, “you’re sniffing after her, even now? The Wolf Bitch has opened her legs for every man from here to the Wall, from Littlefinger to the Bastard-"

Sandor raises a hand - then he pauses, looks at her. She nods.

His fist smashes into Joffrey’s face, and it’s the loveliest sight Sansa’s seen in a long time.

Sansa gestures to Cersei in the next chair, and Sandor slips the gag out of her mouth. Cersei spits at him, the gob of phlegm landing on what’s left of his ear. Sandor doesn’t even flinch.

“You stupid little cunt.” Cersei’s voice shakes with rage. “I’ll give every Lannister man in the city good coin to fuck you. I’ll make your dog watch. I’ll find your sister, your brothers, and I’ll-”

Cool head. Steady arm.

Funny. She always meant to kill Joffrey first.

~

Sandor guides the black town car through late night traffic, his eyes flicking once in awhile to the rearview mirror. Sansa gazes out of the dark-tinted windows, silent. Her chin is propped up on her hands, which are covered in leather gloves.

 _Green_ , he had called them once.

 _Hunter green_ , she had corrected.

_Piss on that, what’s the difference?_

The difference now is that this image lives behind his eyelids: Sansa Stark, winter’s daughter, shooting Cersei Lannister and Joffrey Baratheon in the face. It had been no raging thing from her. Just a precise double-tap, both times, her face ivory-cold.

He grips the steering wheel, hard.

When they get back to the townhouse, the Beauty stands to attention and leaves off polishing her gun. Her sleeves are rolled up to the elbow in crisp folds, but her hair is lank and unkempt. He remembers what it was like when they first met the Beauty, then known as Officer Tarth. She'd been stiff and towering in her dark suit and her trench coat and her severely tidy, slicked back hair. Officer Tarth, saying, _I’m so sorry, Miss Stark. I failed to protect your mother._

“Brienne,” Sansa says. It's the first time she’s spoken since the warehouse. “Please switch with Sandor and take the night watch.”

It roils in Sandor’s gut. He knew it was coming, but it still feels like being punched, sweetly, the air leaving him.

Even though Sansa’s given the order, it’s Sandor who gets the stink-eye, the curled lip. The Beauty's never bothered disguising her distaste for him, but Sansa keeps him around anyway, and the Beauty doesn’t dare say no to the perfect Miss Stark.

“If it pleases Miss Stark,” the Beauty says, stiffly.

“It does,” Sansa says. She drifts to the side bar, uncorks a crystal decanter, and pours the liquid contents over a perfectly round sphere of ice. Scotch, a new vice that Sansa’s taken up, among others.

The townhouse and all its furnishings and pretty trappings are Margaery’s gift. Sandor feels like snarling at the thoughtless wealth that Margaery can throw around. She gave Sansa the run of this place as if she was giving her a dollhouse. Sandor wonders what Sansa did to earn this friendship and generosity, and when the fucking bill will arrive.

The Beauty doesn’t belong here. She's so rigid that she must measure the pinstripes of her shirts with a ruler to get them straight. Sandor doesn’t belong here either. He always feels like breaking something, like pissing on the carpets.

But Sansa. Sansa belongs here, in this place of sleek black surfaces and grey marble and white furs. Surrounded by a forest of dark green walls ( _hunter green_ , Sansa whispers in his mind). White roses bristle from every surface. Here, Sansa isn't a fugitive on the run, scrabbling to survive. Here, Sansa is a queen.

“I’ll be in the bath,” she says, with the barest of glances at Sandor. Her hands hadn’t shaken with the recoil, he remembered. Just smoothly taken the kickback, prepared.

Sandor itches for a drink, but when he drinks, he has the most disgusting, maudlin thoughts. Like how Sansa is like one of those sunsets in the bleak darkness of midwinter, sending rays of light, rose and gold and blood, into a godforsaken sky. All that colour, untouchable, and a cold so deep it burns.

He stands there a moment, another moment, and then another. He roots himself to the spot thinking, _I won’t. She can’t fucking make me. I’m not her fucking lap dog. I won’t -_

He doesn’t even last five minutes.

He finds her heels on the bedroom floor. The black stilettos are blood-red underneath. The rest of her clothes have been likewise abandoned, instead of hung up and put away with Sansa’s usual care. The green leather gloves, the black sheath dress, the dark blazer, and the tailored coat are all in a careless heap on the floor, along with sheer black stockings, crumpled like layers of dark cobwebs. And – Christ – her underwear is there too, black lace bra and panties, as if she’s just stepped right out of them. He knows if he touched them, they’d still be warm from her body. It’s like she’s trying to kill him.

“Sandor,” she calls, softly. He knows she’s sipping Scotch in the bath, the smell of lavender and rosemary rising in the warm, humid air. He knows. He knows.

When he comes in, she hasn’t even washed her hair yet. It’s piled up on top of her head, a lazy loose tottering pile of auburn that he wants to sink his hands into. He wants to breathe her in and feel the warmth steal into his lungs. A few loose strands of hair have fallen already, dipping into the bathwater, curling and clinging to her skin. What skin he can see is flushed rosy from her bath, and despite her boldness, she’s modest enough, covered in frothy tumbles of bubble bath. The ice in her drink is melting into the amber liquid, the sphere revolving lazily in the glass.

He sits on the mosaic tile edges of the sunk-in bath, and tries to think of nothing.

“What do you want?” he snarls. It comes out softer than he intends, from the back of his throat.

She tilts her head to look up at him. She hasn’t washed off her make up either - there’s kohl still lining her eyes, making them even bluer. “It bothered you, what Joffrey said.”

He snorts. “It bothered me that Joffrey breathed. But you took care of that.”

“I meant to kill him first,” she admits, “so that she could watch. But she made me angry.”

 _I’ll make your dog watch_ , Cersei had hissed. As if he doesn’t already torture himself every day thinking of what they did to her. Joffrey and Littlefinger and the Bastard of Bolton. Every bloody bastard he could never protect her from.

Sansa raises the glass to her lips, and tilts her head back. He watches her throat move, and he cannot stop watching.

“What do you want, Sansa?” he asks, again, harsher this time.

“You know,” she says.

And he does. But part of him, the kicked dog part, keeps hoping that if he asks the same question enough times, he’ll get a different answer.

He learned the answer in the alley behind the Vale, Petyr’s body not ten feet away, blood pooling around his fallen body. He learned it when Sansa whispered a prayer and Rickon slumped over, one quick clean shot ending the Bastard’s mind games. He learned it when Sansa set the Bastard’s own dogs on him, her eyes cool and unwavering, the smallest of smiles touching her lips.

He doesn’t know, anymore, who’s fucking who.

He leans forward. His hands cradle the back of her neck, fingers sinking into all that warmth. Her empty glass slides into the bathwater with a gentle thunk. He kisses her hard and fierce and deep, the way she likes. She moans into his mouth, moans his name, and that’s it, he’s lost. Like the dog he is.

~

He carries her to the bed, and she’s slippery as a fish, her warm, damp hair clinging. Fuck the water on the snowy comforter, fuck the fancy sheets. It’s the same as the alleyway where he’d pressed her into the rough brick. The same as the shitty mattress on the floor in that abandoned apartment. The same as the hotel bathroom where he’d hoisted her up onto the counter. It’s all the fucking same.

She’s breathless, wet and gasping, pushing her naked body against his while also trying to tear his clothes off. Sansa manages to get his shirt open and she presses her breasts against his bare chest. Her legs lock tight around him, and fuck. Fuck. It’s so hard to think like this, when Sansa is all need and want, gorgeous and brutal, red-painted nails raking down his back. She bites him with a kiss and he swears. She’s drawn blood and laps at it, hungry. Sansa is all snarls, Fuck me already, and he says, Fucking hell, pinching her hard on the inside of one thigh. She yelps, startled into releasing her vise grip on him, and that gives him enough time to shove off his shirt, his jeans, his boxers. Christ. Fuck, he’s so hard. This is going to be over before it even begins.

She breaks him out of the reverie by throwing a condom at his chest. The swear dies in his throat when he sees her, sprawled out on the comforter, pale skin and long legs and her hair a bright blaze in the lamplight. Her head’s thrown back and she’s stroking herself, the tips of those slim, elegant fingers (her fingers, wrapped in hunter green gloves, squeezing the trigger) disappearing inside of herself. He can hear the slick, obscene sounds of her wetness, the broken little cries coming from her throat.

But it’s the lamplight that does him in. The skin of Sansa’s face and hands and feet are perfect, pale and unblemished, but the rest of it... He’s never seen all of her skin bared, not like this. They fucked clothed or half-clothed all those other times, and always in the protection of the dark. Sansa’s clothes are always carefully chosen and torturously skin-tight, but they always conceal her from wrist to arm, from hip to ankle. He was never even conscious of it before, and now he knows why.

He’s never seen the raw battlefield of her, the beautiful ruin of her skin. He has no words for all the different scars she bears.

Sansa’s sitting up in bed, now. She’s looking at him looking at her, and then - she’s winter again. A snap of pure cold.

Without a word, she slips out of bed, past him, her hair waterfalling down and covering her back. She bends to picks up her clothes, and his hand shoots out to latch onto her wrist before he can even think. His head, his chest, his fists, the useless bloody organ of his heart - they’re all pounding so hard.

“I’ll kill them,” he rasps. “I’ll kill them all for you.”

When she turns to him, her eyes are bright and hard. “I already did.”

And he has to kiss her for that. He can’t not kiss her, this beautiful, vengeful woman who only calls him into her bed when she’s got blood on her hands. She’s got living proof of her survival written all over her body, and he wants to touch and touch and never stop touching her. He’s always surprised his hands don’t come away smoking and scorched when he brushes her skin. Gods. He’s only human.

She breaks the kiss and twists her hand out of his. “Don’t tell me you’ve got a fetish for broken things,” she says. The words are joking, but her voice is not.

He barks a laugh. “Isn’t it the other way around? Why else would you fuck me, if you didn’t like your pets all broken in?”

He can see a look of exquisite fury building on her face. Combined with that glorious nakedness, her tumbling hair, and her hands on her hips, he can hardly be blamed for wanting to pin her to the mattress - any flat surface, really - and lick his way up those thighs until she’s keening and calling his name. He’s never had the chance to do that yet, but he’s thought about it, more times than he can count, with his hand on his cock and his breath tight in his throat so that Sansa won’t hear how pathetic he is in his yearning for her.

“You’re not broken,” she says, her voice still low with that fury that is sending all the blood in his body rushing towards his cock. “And you’re not my pet. Otherwise you’d be obedient, and well behaved, and-”

“I'm your bloody junkyard killer,” he murmurs into her throat, where he can feel the smallest hitch in her breath. He doesn’t even know how that quite happened, how his hands found her hips, how he dipped his head down to nuzzle and lick at the delicate dip in her throat. Sansa’s hands are clutching at his shoulders, his hair, lost.

“And I hate to tell you this, Little Bird, but a scar or two isn’t going to make you anything less than fucking gorgeous.”

She sputters, enraged, “A _scar_ or _two_ -” but he’s already picked her up by all her angry, flailing limbs, and dumped her on the bed. She’s crosses her arms across her breasts, which just emphasizes them.

“Yeah,” he says, completely unsympathetic. “You’re not your scars.”

Her jaw drops open. “Well that is _rich_ -“ but he’s already dragged open her thighs and he’s too impatient to tongue her starting from the inside of her knees, like he’d always imagined. He noses right into those tight auburn curls a shade darker than the hair on her head, and she’s so. Wet.

He sighs happily, licking into the wet warmth where she is amber and honey and musk and woman, thick on his tongue, and so fucking good it makes his toes curl. He’s licked his fingers before, after they’d been in her, but it’s not the same.

Her thighs are flexing around his face, and she’s making these sounds high up in her throat, almost a whine, and her hands are digging into his scalp, so hard he knows he’ll bleed. He thrusts his tongue into her and – ah, ah, fuck. Fuck that’s good, the way she’s thrusting her hips against his face, bucking up as if trying to take his tongue deeper, and he gets a finger in her, knuckle deep, then two, and he knows he’s moaning too, moaning into her. He doesn’t even know what he’s begging for, only that he is.

Sansa’s begging too, not the snarls of _fuck me_ already from earlier, just this chant of _please, please, please_. He crooks his fingers in her the way he knows she likes. He works and works her, relentless, reverent. Gods, he could do this for ages. He doesn’t know how much time passes as he loses himself between her legs. She says, choked, _I’m – I’m_ \- and never finishes her sentence; all her words break up into beautiful noise. She’s flooding his mouth, and he has to squeeze himself hard to keep from coming just from that, from the taste of her. He swallows and licks, swallows and licks, through all her little aftershocks and tremors.

When he looks up, she’s looking down at him. She lets go of his hair, and he misses the contact, the ferociousness of those tight, imperious tugs as she had urged him on, but now she’s – she’s – she’s fucking _petting his hair_ , that’s the only word for it, and stroking parts of it back into place.

She just came, and yet he’s the one struck dumb as a dog, undone by this strange tenderness. It’s not even sexual, that’s the maddening thing. His throat is closing with a feeling that he can’t or won’t name.

Sansa lies there for a while, still petting him. Then she says, “You were going to fuck me.”

“As if I could forget,” he says, barking out a laugh. “Your highness.”

She gives his hair one short, sharp tug. He tries to suppress a shiver and fails.

She pulls away from him – he whines, which is embarrassing, but she throws him an amused look – but she’s scooting back onto the bed, and reaching over to her bedside table. She pours water from a decanter into a glass and offers it to him.

“Thirsty work, I imagine,” she says, her flush a shade pinker, and he raises an eyebrow.

He stands up, still erect, and he drinks, knowing that she’s watching him, knowing that her eyes are traveling all the way down his body. It’s almost a shame to wash the taste of her from his mouth (amber and honey, musk and woman, and he can still smell her on his fingers), but the water is cool on his throat, and it _is_ thirsty work ( _and you could taste her again_ , the bad part of him says, the black dog part of him, t _he next time she kills_ ).

And he wants her as he always does, but it’s different, for some reason, now that she’s come. He’s used to their desperate, furious fucks, Sansa tearing it all out of him and leaving him gasping and empty, tumbling one after another then separating and never saying a word. Not this - whatever this is - whatever strange alchemy this evening is borne out of.

He doesn’t think he’s the only one that feels that way, because Sansa’s chewing on the bottom of her lip, looking at him. He finds himself sinking onto the bed, not looming over her, but sitting across from her. Her game, her rule, always.

“What if-” She pauses. She sounds more uncertain than he’s ever heard her since this all began. “What if-”

And then she steels herself, becomes herself again, the Sansa he knows now, the Wolf Bitch. “Fuck it,” she says, and she turns her back to him, draws that long shining curtain of hair over one shoulder, braces her hands on the headboard and says, “Fuck me like this.”

And he can’t breathe. He can’t fucking breathe because even though Sansa’s back is naked, it’s not bare. It must be scarred like the rest of her, it must be, but he can’t tell, because there’s a giant fucking wolf inked onto her back, all the way down to the dip in her spine. The wolf is grey and white and golden-eyed, gentle and fierce, blood on her muzzle and yellow-white flowers between her paws.

Sansa’s heart is pounding very loud, or maybe that’s his.

He strokes her back, as if touching one of the wolf’s ears, and Sansa shivers beneath the touch. Her skin is warm, textured, alive, and he rests both of his hands on her shoulders, still surprisingly slim for the burden they carry, and he strokes her, all the way down her back. He wants to touch every inch of her.

“That’s Lady,” Sansa says. Her voice is almost trembling, as if under a great strain, but she carries on. “The Lannisters made my father kill her.”

Sandor’s hands curl against her skin. It feels wrong to speak of them now - but if it weren’t for the lions, Sansa never would have spoken to him at all.

Sandor bends down and kisses Sansa’s back. He kisses Lady’s nose, right at the tip of her bloody muzzle, and he can feel Sansa’s soft, sharp intake of breath.

He wraps himself around her, rests his mouth against the side of her throat, which is still flushed, and he murmurs into the skin there, “And you killed them all.”

He can feel her spine straighten. “And I killed them all,” she breathes. “They killed my father, they made me watch, and I destroyed them.”

He guides himself inside of her still-wet cunt and swears. Sansa moans differently from the other times he’s been inside of her, the angle different, maddeningly good. He pushes into her, testing, and she pushes back, challenging. She fucks herself onto him, slow and shivery and teasing, and something in him snaps. He starts to fuck her in earnest. She clutches the headboard, swearing and shaking, half-wild, and he’s gripping her hips so tight and fucking into her, fuck, fuck, and she’s not even speaking words anymore, just a mess of incomprehensible, filthy things, and he knows he’s saying, _I love you, I love you, I love you, Sansa_.

Because he’s allowed to do that here, only here, nowhere else. This is the only place and it’s the only time where it’s ever been safe to say it, because it doesn’t count, really. It doesn’t count, not when it’s like this, when he’s so deep inside of her that he can feel her whole body trembling and quaking around him, a deep red dream-world made of Sansa, wolves made of ink and the warmest winter and all the songs yet to be sung and fire that doesn’t burn. She twists up so that she can look at him while he’s inside her, she touches the scarred side of his face and she says his name like she’s saying _I love you_ back, and he’s coming, helplessly, hopelessly. And then it’s over.

~

 _I’ll give you his head,_ Sansa had said, a long time ago, almost two years ago. She had had her arms wrapped around herself, protective. She’d still been a pretty little thing, but lifeless, wearing a dark purple sweater that leeched the colour out of her.

(Later on, she’ll tell him about how Cersei and Joffrey didn’t let her wear mourning for her father, how her make up always had to be perfect, because _Joffrey likes me pretty_. He’ll think, later, that that’s what he fell in love with, the bitterness in her voice when she talks about what she had to do to survive.)

 _I’ll give you his head_ , Sansa had repeated. He looked up from where he was cleaning his gun and she had added, _Your brother’s._

He had stood up, towering over her. She hadn’t backed away, but took one step closer, and he remembered feeling greedy and gratified by that. She tipped her head back and stared right back at him. Hollow. Fierce.

 _You couldn’t get me his fucking pinky toe,_ Sandor had said. _And if anyone’s going to rip my brother’s head off, it will be me._

 _I could help,_ she says, and he snorts. Sansa Stark - no weapons, no resources, no allies, promising murder.

She tilts her chin. _If you don’t want that,_ she says, f _ine. You can have me._

He stops laughing.

 _Help me escape_ , Sansa says, _and I’m yours._

It was a lie, of course.

~

He cleans himself up in the washroom that smells like lavender and rosemary, those same scents that were under her breasts and behind her knees, mixed with her sweat. He wipes himself off, hesitates, then takes one of those dainty hand towels from where it's rolled up in a little gold basket, and soaks it in warm, not hot, water.

When he comes out, Sansa is still lying on top of the covers, but curled up, hair drifting all around her. “Hey,” he says, but she swats his arm away, sleepy. “Fine, you fucking spoiled brat,” he growls, and he swipes at her with the hand towel, but gently, gently. She starts at the first touch, but then parts her legs and lets him clean her. She’s boneless and sleepy, and - rarity of rarities - in this moment, trusting. This feels like another part of her that he’s never gotten to see, another Sansa.

The first time they’d done this, Sansa had sagged in his arms, coming down from the high. When her breathing was even, she tugged down her skirt and said, “We need to hide the body.” It was like it had never happened.

He’s still stroking her with that towel absently, even though she must be clean. Her eyes aren’t closed anymore, they’re blue and open and looking at him. “Sandor,” she says. Her voice is a little strange.

“Yeah,” he says. She stills his hand, and he lets the towel drop to the floor.

Her eyes are so damnably clear. “You,” she clears her throat. But she doesn’t look away. “You called me Little Bird.”

He remembers what he’d thought of her when they first met. He’d been dismissive and scornful, with the faintest curl of longing. She’d been this delicate, pretty little thing perched at Joffrey’s side, wide-eyed with fear and mouthing the words of others. Back then, she’d been too scared to look at him dead on in the face.

“I did,” he says. Somehow, he doesn’t know how, one of his thumbs has found the inside of her wrist, and he’s stroking at her pulse point. Her wrists are slim and pale, so easy to pin down. He wants to press his mouth against them instead, and that feels more dangerous, somehow.

“You haven’t called me that in ages,” she says. “Not since we - not since this started.”

Not since the alleyway, the frantic jerk of Sansa’s hips against his own, his face buried in the hollow of her throat, as he rocked into her and they’d shuddered, and shuddered, and she gasped, and he’d tried to burn the sound into his memory, so convinced that the first time would be the last.

“You haven’t seemed like a little bird, for a long time now.”

Now she’s a creature of sinew and steel, red like the heart of a heart tree from that cold land she calls home. Her allies call her the Red Wolf and her enemies call her the Wolf Bitch and she bears both names like a mantle. She was never a Lannister and never a Bolton; she was always, only, ever Sansa Stark.

Now, she doesn’t turn away from him. Now, she looks him full in the face when he fucks her.

Then she says, “I still feel like one.” It’s a confession, not so much spoken as breathed, the syllables ghosting over his skin. For all that they’ve been joined, he’s never heard Sansa sound more naked. “Sometimes. In some moments, I still feel like that stupid little girl.”

His thumb stills on her pulse. He brings her wrist to his mouth, and places his mouth over it like he’s wanted to, hums a kiss into her skin. Gregor would have beat him for being such a bloody fool. “You’re a wolf, through and through,” he tells her. He could see her with a reddened muzzle like Lady's, ripping out the throats of her enemies, blood spraying on the snow. “A proper bitch.”

She lets out a slow, slow, sigh, like she’s unspooling a silk scarf, like he’s said something sweet and worth keeping.

Sometimes, he wishes she’d just put him out of his misery. Release him from her service and tell him to fuck off, so he can start the miserable, inevitable process of living without her, instead of putting it off, day by day by day. Every day that she gains more control of the North, she needs a junkyard killer less and less. Touching her feels like pressing into the sweet spot at the centre of a bruise.

“Stay,” she says. She doesn’t ask, anymore; she commands. “Stay with me.”

He freezes. For one heartbeat, and then another. It doesn’t matter if she means this night or all nights. This skates too close to the things he wants but can never speak of. He can’t even look at her, fucking beautiful Sansa with her rage and her scars and her songs and her ink and that last bit of sweetness that survives even though she keeps trying to kill it. She could destroy him so easily.

“You don’t want me to stay,” he says, to the wall. “You don’t want me at all, not really. You want to be held down and fucked into forgetfulness by some brute. But I’m a brute you can trust, a kicked dog that will keep coming back to you.”

He wishes he was saying this in anger. Anger’s been his boon companion all these years, keeping him hot-blooded and alive. But he can hear the exhaustion and the sadness and the simple truth in his own words.

And Sansa is sitting up now, wide-eyed. She’s touching his face again, with both hands, and that’s just not fair, to use bed tricks at a time like this. He’s going to tell her off, but she’s looking at him, a look that is fierce and soft at the same time, a look that’s terrifying because there’s no bottom to it - it’s all depth.

“You’re the only one,” she says, voice shaking, “who still looks at me the same. Even after I’ve done the very worst things, you still look at me as if,” and here, her voice falters, “as if I’m beautiful.”

And then she says something so untrue and so strange that he knows she must have gone mad, somewhere in between gunning down the last of the Lannisters and now.

She says, “I don’t deserve you.”

Well. He has no words for that, either. 

He should leave right now. Pull on his clothes, leave his gun on the table, call a friend who can forge him a decent passport, head to somewhere warm and sunny that has never heard of Sansa Stark. Chew off his arm to get out of this trap, to escape this warm feeling that’s flooding him and taking him over. He should leave, if he wants to be sane and he wants to live and he wants to be unhaunted all his days. If he stays here, by the end of this, he won’t have anything - not a single cell of his body - that won’t belong to her.

But he doesn’t.

Instead, he folds himself around her and drags the blanket over both of them. She’s still for a moment, and then she fumbles with the lamp and the room goes dark. He tries to stay awake, to memorize the strange sensation of being both sated and pressed against Sansa, the warmth and the texture of her naked skin. Sansa tucks one of his arms between both of hers so it’s flush against her breasts, and he thinks, _There are worse things to be haunted by._

Sansa whispers, “Thank you.” There’s the lightest of butterfly brushes against his knuckles, something that might almost be called a kiss. And before he can think, _Sansa wouldn’t do that_ , he’s being pulled under by the black tide of sleep.

~

“Killing is the sweetest thing there is,” Sandor had told her once, and he had been half-right.

But only half.

~ Finis.

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Broken Social Scene. One summary line adapted from Margaret Atwood: “The youngest in a family of dragons is still a dragon.” 
> 
> I have toyed with writing earlier Sandor/Sansa in this ‘verse so you can see all the hot dirty post-murder smut from Sansa’s other kills, and/or the morning after this scene, but I also feel like this stands pretty well on its own. 
> 
> Thanks for reading! Your kudos and comments are much appreciated! 
> 
> March 26, 2017: Minor edits and also formatting issues cleared up, since AO3 stripped all my italics. Hopefully, this will make more sense now!


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